For about 30 days, I drew a butterfly everyday after my morning meditation. Following every sit, I would pick up a book on Atlantic Canadian butterflies and choose one image to work from from the first 5 or so that I opened, then drew for 5-30 minutes. After a few days, I began to realize that working with a representation of a specific subject (the butterfly) was a container to freely explore the true subject of which I was working myself into (technique); the butterflies quickly became less important to me than what emerged in the desire to make a gesture, the quality of my attention, and the feeling state that determined my actions and compositional intuition. There is a nuance for me to the subtle expression recorded in the abstracted elements of each drawing that is diaristic – like the record of a dream – giving each drawing the sense of a visitation. These are 12 that I felt most fond of ~
~ Distilled By The Intuition Of Your Own Cells ~
Home-fired vine charcoal on cottonwood seed fluff paper and thistledown paper. Ongoing series.
I’ve been making paper for the last couple of years from the small seed fibres of local “weeds,” trees, and marsh reeds. I’ve never used these precious small papers until recently, when I’ve had the desire to practice drawing again outside my animation work. All the materials for these drawings are foraged and processed at home & I’m delighting in the liveliness that the process carries.
The title of this series stems from a quote that I’ve been carrying around with me from Sophie Strand’s beautiful memoir The Body is a Doorway ~~ An incredibly poignant & tender book about chronic illness and ecology.
“Inside the cocoon the caterpillar digests itself. It deliquesces its nervous system, guts, mouth, eyes, muscles, and legs. What does it feel like to melt? I would hesitate to say it feels like “becoming yourself”. What if one day after a big salad you suddenly started to feel very sick. You went to lie down, rubbing your temples. Maybe a migraine was blooming behind your eyes. When, suddenly, you realized your skin was sloughing off. There was a tidal pool where your chest should be. There is every reason to believe that the caterpillar’s metamorphosis feels terrifying. Or that it feels like death. I wonder if the radical inability to classify the experience is a necessary ingredient in transformation. Each one of the caterpillar’s cells has held this secret ability to self-destruct since birth. This, to me, seems the most comforting thing. Even if the mind is destabilized, literally liquefied, by the transformation, even if the body puddles, you are being “authored” at a deeper level than mind or skin-silhouette. You are being distilled by the intuition of your own cells. A few “imaginal disc cells” remain constant that then “use” the slush of protein and matter to compose a butterfly.”
